Skewes Jacob, Chen Michael Y, Forrestal David, Rukin Nicholas J, Woodruff Maria A
Engineering Faculty, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, QLD, Australia.
Herston Biofabrication Institute, Metro North Hospital and Health Service, Brisbane, QLD, Australia.
Front Surg. 2021 Apr 20;8:626143. doi: 10.3389/fsurg.2021.626143. eCollection 2021.
Patients often opt for implantation of testicular prostheses following orchidectomy for cancer or torsion. Recipients of testicular prostheses report issues regarding firmness, shape, size, and position, aspects of which relate to current limitations of silicone materials used and manufacturing methods for soft prostheses. We aim to create a 3D printable testicular prosthesis which mimics the natural shape and stiffness of a human testicle using a lattice infill structure. Porous testicular prostheses were engineered with relative densities from 0.1 to 0.9 using a repeating cubic unit cell lattice inside an anatomically accurate testicle 3D model. These models were printed using a multi-jetting process with an elastomeric material and compared with current market prostheses using shore hardness tests. Additionally, standard sized porous specimens were printed for compression testing to verify and match the stiffness to human testicle elastic modulus (E-modulus) values from literature. The resulting 3D printed testicular prosthesis of relative density between 0.3 and 0.4 successfully achieved a reduction of its bulk compressive E-modulus from 360 KPa to a human testicle at 28 Kpa. Additionally, this is the first study to quantitatively show that current commercial testicular prostheses are too firm compared to native tissue. 3D printing allows us to create metamaterials that match the properties of human tissue to create customisable patient specific prostheses. This method expands the use cases for existing biomaterials by tuning their properties and could be applied to other implants mimicking native tissues.
患者在因癌症或睾丸扭转接受睾丸切除术后，通常会选择植入睾丸假体。睾丸假体的接受者报告了有关硬度、形状、大小和位置的问题，其中一些方面与当前所用硅酮材料的局限性以及软质假体的制造方法有关。我们的目标是使用晶格填充结构创建一种3D可打印的睾丸假体，该假体能够模仿人类睾丸的自然形状和硬度。利用解剖学精确的睾丸3D模型内部的重复立方晶胞晶格，设计出相对密度从0.1到0.9的多孔睾丸假体。这些模型使用弹性材料通过多喷射工艺打印，并通过邵氏硬度测试与当前市场上的假体进行比较。此外，还打印了标准尺寸的多孔标本进行压缩测试，以验证其硬度并使其与文献中人类睾丸弹性模量（E模量）值相匹配。最终得到的相对密度在0.3至0.4之间的3D打印睾丸假体成功地将其体积压缩E模量从360千帕降低到了人类睾丸的28千帕。此外，这是第一项定量表明当前商业睾丸假体相比天然组织过于坚硬的研究。3D打印使我们能够创建与人体组织特性相匹配的超材料，以制造可定制的个性化假体。这种方法通过调整现有生物材料的特性来扩展其用例，并且可以应用于其他模仿天然组织的植入物。
